Texas Left Me Out

Obamacare advocates are actively recruiting those left out of the Medicaid expansion in Republican-controlled states to lobby state officials to change their minds and participate in that key provision of the health care reform law.

So far, the effort is most organized in Texas, which is also the state with the most people in that Medicaid expansion gap: 1 million. But it’s likely to pick up elsewhere as the Obama administration and outside advocates apply pressure to the 25 states that have resisted expansion for the first year.

Texas Left Me Out, the combined effort of several community groups, is a website designed to collect those people’s stories and organize them into a cohesive political action constituency. It asks those in the Medicaid gap to sign a petition to stay informed about advocacy events and share their story on the site.

Are they going to turn Texas blue on the backs of people who have traditionally been ignored by Republicans? Are they going to convince an anti-Obamacare stalwart like Rick Perry to buy into the law? That’s a tough sell. But they’re going to try.

“When you personalize a policy, when you make it real, it’s always much more powerful. It’s always going to resonate,” Tiffany Hogue, state health care campaign coordinator at the Texas Organizing Project, one of the groups involved with the campaign, told TPM. “People have really have awakened to the fact that people really are getting left behind.”

Texas Left Me Out had a soft launch in October in preparation for a January rollout. The Texas Organizing Project says it has already contacted 100,000 people who are in the gap and convinced 20,000 to commit to be part of the campaign. They hope that those numbers will grow substantially before the Texas legislature reconvenes in 2015, its next opportunity to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. They’ve set recruitment targets for specific legislative districts to focus their efforts.

The broader coalition is also eyeing the 2014 elections. The presumed Democratic frontrunner for governor, state Sen. Wendy Davis, has enthusiastically endorsed expansion, and a more Democratic legislature would also be more likely to sign onto a major piece of the health care reform law.

The strategy is simple: sheer political force. They’ll ask people to turn up at legislative committee hearings and stage protests at the state capitol. Conference calls and press conferences will be the norm. They aren’t waiting for 2015 either. A group is going to a state insurance department meeting Dec. 20 to rally for expansion.

The website is here. I’m not at all surprised to see that Progress Texas is one of the forces behind it. The goals are ambitious, but we’re not going to get anywhere by thinking small.

And despite the ferocious efforts by Texas Republicans to deny health care coverage to its residents, demand for health insurance is strong.

Texas has the second-highest number of people who have purchased health plans through the embattled online insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act, according to enrollment figures for October and November released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But as a percentage of the uninsured in the second-largest state — which has the nation’s worst rate of health coverage — the number is tiny: 14,000 Texans had purchased coverage through healthcare.gov by the end of November.

The number of people who purchased coverage in the federal marketplace, which has been riddled with technical problems, was four times higher in November than in October: 137,204 people, including 14,000 Texans, had purchased coverage there as of the end of November, whereas only 27,000 people, including 3,000 Texans, had purchased coverage there at the end of October.

“Evidence of the technical improvements to HealthCare.gov can be seen in the enrollment numbers,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, said in a press statement.

Florida had the highest enrollment numbers, with 17,900 people purchasing coverage in the federal marketplace, followed by Texas, and Pennsylvania, with 11,800 people purchasing coverage. 2.2 million people, including 245,000 Texans, have now completed applications through the federal marketplace.

Texas has the nation’s highest rate of people without health insurance at 24.6 percent, according to U.S. Census data. About 48 million Americans — including more than 6 million Texans — were uninsured in 2011 and 2012.

Those numbers are two weeks old now, but there’s no indication that the pace has slowed since then. Remember when you hear a Texas Republican whine about Obamacare that they have been in complete control of Texas’ government for over a decade now. If they cared at all about those six million uninsured people, they’ve had ample opportunity to do something about it. But they don’t, so they haven’t. Nothing will change until our state government changes. That’s why efforts like Texas Left Me Out matter.

Ross, all the uncovered already have coverage, and we’re already paying for it. Everytime someone without any insurance gets rushed to an ER and can’t pay the costs, it comes out of our pockets through increased burdens on hospitals, which raises everyone’s insurance costs. With Medicaid expansion, the costs will be lowered for everyone because people will be seeing doctors and treating their issues ahead of time. This means that the Federal Government will SAVE money by paying for our poorest citizens to be well.